The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “No, no, what you do is show how this guy’s delusion is related to the fad. Fascinating.” Lucille, having found a ribbon, prodded doubtfully at the exposed innards of her typewriter.

  “Suppose I fictionalize it,” Floria said, “under a pseudonym. Why not ride the popular wave and be free in what I can say?”

  “Listen, you’ve never written a word of fiction in your life, have you?” Lucille fixed her with a bloodshot gaze. “There’s no evidence that you could turn out a bestselling novel. On the other hand, by this time you have a trained memory for accurately reporting therapeutic transactions. That’s a strength you’d be foolish to waste. A solid professional book would be terrific—and a feather in the cap of every woman in the field. Just make sure you get good legal advice on disguising your Dracula’s identity well enough to avoid libel.”

  The cane-seated chair wasn’t worth repairing, so she got its twin out of the bedroom to put in the office in its place. Puzzling: by his history Weyland was fifty-two, and by his appearance no muscle man. She should have asked Doug—but how, exactly? “By the way, Doug, was Weyland ever a circus strong man or a blacksmith? Does he secretly pump iron?” Ask the client himself—but not yet.

  * * *

  She invited some of the younger staff from the clinic over for a small party with a few of her outside friends. It was a good evening; they were not a heavy-drinking crowd, which meant the conversation stayed intelligent. The guests drifted about the long living room or stood in twos and threes at the windows looking down on West End Avenue as they talked.

  Mort came, warming the room. Fresh from a session with some amateur chamber-music friends, he still glowed with the pleasure of making his cello sing. His own voice was unexpectedly light for so large a man. Sometimes Floria thought that the deep throb of the cello was his true voice.

  He stood beside her talking with some others. There was no need to lean against his comfortable bulk or to have him put his arm around her waist. Their intimacy was long-standing, an effortless pleasure in each other that required neither demonstration nor concealment.

  He was easily diverted from music to his next favorite topic, the strengths and skills of athletes.

  “Here’s a question for a paper I’m thinking of writing,” Floria said. “Could a tall, lean man be exceptionally strong?”

  Mort rambled on in his thoughtful way. His answer seemed to be no.

  “But what about chimpanzees?” put in a young clinician. “I went with a guy once who was an animal handler for TV, and he said a three-month-old chimp could demolish a strong man.”

  “It’s all physical conditioning,” somebody else said. “Modern people are soft.”

  Mort nodded. “Human beings in general are weakly made compared to other animals. It’s a question of muscle insertions—the angles of how the muscles are attached to the bones. Some angles give better leverage than others. That’s how a leopard can bring down a much bigger animal than itself. It has a muscular structure that gives it tremendous strength for its streamlined build.”

  Floria said, “If a man were built with muscle insertions like a leopard’s, he’d look pretty odd, wouldn’t he?”

  “Not to an untrained eye,” Mort said, sounding bemused by an inner vision. “And my God, what an athlete he’d make—can you imagine a guy in the decathlon who’s as strong as a leopard?”

  When everyone else had gone Mort stayed, as he often did. Jokes about insertions, muscular and otherwise, soon led to sounds more expressive and more animal, but afterward Floria didn’t feel like resting snuggled together with Mort and talking. When her body stopped racing, her mind turned to her new client. She didn’t want to discuss him with Mort, so she ushered Mort out as gently as she could and sat down by herself at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice.

  How to approach the reintegration of Weyland the eminent, gray-haired academic with the rebellious vampire-self that had smashed his life out of shape?

  She thought of the broken chair, of Weyland’s big hands crushing the wood. Old wood and dried-out glue, of course, or he never could have done that. He was a man, after all, not a leopard.

  * * *

  The day before the third session Weyland phoned and left a message with Hilda: he would not be coming to the office tomorrow for his appointment, but if Dr. Landauer were agreeable she would find him at their usual hour at the Central Park Zoo.

  Am I going to let him move me around from here to there? she thought. I shouldn’t—but why fight it? Give him some leeway, see what opens up in a different setting. Besides, it was a beautiful day, probably the last of the sweet May weather before the summer stickiness descended. She gladly cut Kenny short so that she would have time to walk over to the zoo.

  There was a fair crowd there for a weekday. Well-groomed young matrons pushed clean, floppy babies in strollers. Weyland she spotted at once.

  He was leaning against the railing that enclosed the seals’ shelter and their murky green pool. His jacket, slung over his shoulder, draped elegantly down his long back. Floria thought him rather dashing and faintly foreign-looking. Women who passed him, she noticed, tended to glance back.

  He looked at everyone. She had the impression that he knew quite well that she was walking up behind him.

  “Outdoors makes a nice change from the office, Edward,” she said, coming to the rail beside him. “But there must be more to this than a longing for fresh air.” A fat seal lay in sculptural grace on the concrete, eyes blissfully shut, fur drying in the sun to a translucent water-color umber.

  Weyland straightened from the rail. They walked. He did not look at the animals; his eyes moved continually over the crowd. He said, “Someone has been watching for me at your office building.”

  “Who?”

  “There are several possibilities. Pah, what a stench—though humans caged in similar circumstances smell as bad.” He sidestepped a couple of shrieking children who were fighting over a balloon and headed out of the zoo under the musical clock.

  They walked the uphill path northward through the park. By extending her own stride a little Floria found that she could comfortably keep pace with him.

  “Is it peasants with torches?” she said. “Following you?”

  He said, “What a childish idea.”

  All right, try another tack, then: “You were telling me last time about hunting in the Ramble. Can we return to that?”

  “If you wish.” He sounded bored—a defense? Surely—she was certain this must be the right reading—surely his problem was a transmutation into “vampire” fantasy of an unacceptable aspect of himself. For men of his generation the confrontation with homosexual drives could be devastating.

  “When you pick up someone in the Ramble, is it a paid encounter?”

  “Usually.”

  “How do you feel about having to pay?” She expected resentment.

  He gave a faint shrug. “Why not? Others work to earn their bread. I work, too, very hard, in fact. Why shouldn’t I use my earnings to pay for my sustenance?”

  Why did he never play the expected card? Baffled, she paused to drink from a fountain. They walked on.

  “Once you’ve got your quarry, how do you . . .” She fumbled for a word.

  “Attack?” he supplied, unperturbed. “There’s a place on the neck, here, where pressure can interrupt the blood flow to the brain and cause unconsciousness. Getting close enough to apply that pressure isn’t difficult.”

  “You do this before, or after any sexual activity?”

  “Before, if possible,” he said aridly, “and instead of.” He turned aside to stalk up a slope to a granite outcrop that overlooked the path they had been following. There he settled on his haunches, looking back the way they had come. Floria, glad she’d worn slacks today, sat down near him.

  He didn’t seem devastated—anything but. Press him, don’t let him get by on cool. “Do you often prey on men in preference to women?”

  “Certainly. I t
ake what is easiest. Men have always been more accessible because women have been walled away like prizes or so physically impoverished by repeated childbearing as to be unhealthy prey for me. All this has begun to change recently, but gay men are still the simplest quarry.” While she was recovering from her surprise at his unforeseen and weirdly skewed awareness of female history, he added suavely, “How carefully you control your expression, Dr. Landauer—no trace of disapproval.”

  She did disapprove, she realized. She would prefer him not to be committed sexually to men. Oh, hell.

  He went on, “Yet no doubt you see me as one who victimizes the already victimized. This is the world’s way. A wolf brings down the stragglers at the edges of the herd. Gay men are denied the full protection of the human herd and are at the same time emboldened to make themselves known and available.

  “On the other hand, unlike the wolf I can feed without killing, and these particular victims pose no threat to me that would cause me to kill. Outcasts themselves, even if they comprehend my true purpose among them they cannot effectively accuse me.”

  God, how neatly, completely, and ruthlessly he distanced the homosexual community from himself! “And how do you feel, Edward, about their purposes—their sexual expectations of you?”

  “The same way I feel about the sexual expectations of women whom I choose to pursue: they don’t interest me. Besides, once my hunger is active, sexual arousal is impossible. My physical unresponsiveness seems to surprise no one. Apparently impotence is expected in a gray-haired man, which suits my intention.”

  Some kids carrying radios swung past below, trailing a jumble of amplified thump, wail, and jabber. Floria gazed after them unseeingly, thinking, astonished again, that she had never heard a man speak of his own impotence with such cool indifference. She had induced him to talk about his problem all right. He was speaking as freely as he had in the first session, only this time it was no act. He was drowning her in more than she had ever expected or for that matter wanted to know about vampirism. What the hell: she was listening, she thought she understood—what was it all good for? Time for some cold reality, she thought; see how far he can carry all this incredible detail. Give the whole structure a shove.

  She said, “You realize, I’m sure, that people of either sex who make themselves so easily available are also liable to be carriers of disease. When was your last medical checkup?”

  “My dear Dr. Landauer, my first medical checkup will be my last. Fortunately, I have no great need of one. Most serious illnesses—hepatitis, for example—reveal themselves to me by a quality in the odor of the victim’s skin. Warned, I abstain. When I do fall ill, as occasionally happens, I withdraw to some place where I can heal undisturbed. A doctor’s attentions would be more dangerous to me than any disease.”

  Eyes on the path below, he continued calmly, “You can see by looking at me that there are no obvious clues to my unique nature. But believe me, an examination of any depth by even a half-sleeping medical practitioner would reveal some alarming deviations from the norm. I take pains to stay healthy, and I seem to be gifted with an exceptionally hardy constitution.”

  Fantasies of being unique and physically superior; take him to the other pole. “I’d like you to try something now. Will you put yourself into the mind of a man you contact in the Ramble and describe your encounter with him from his point of view?”

  He turned toward her and for some moments regarded her without expression. Then he resumed his surveillance of the path. “I will not. Though I do have enough empathy with my quarry to enable me to hunt efficiently, I must draw the line at erasing the necessary distance that keeps prey and predator distinct.

  “And now I think our ways part for today.” He stood up, descended the hillside, and walked beneath some low-canopied trees, his tall back stooped, toward the Seventy-Second Street entrance of the park.

  Floria arose more slowly, aware suddenly of her shallow breathing and the sweat on her face. Back to reality or what remained of it. She looked at her watch. She was late for her next client.

  * * *

  Floria couldn’t sleep that night. Barefoot in her bathrobe she paced the living room by lamplight. They had sat together on that hill as isolated as in her office—more so, because there was no Hilda and no phone. He was, she knew, very strong, and he had sat close enough to her to reach out for that paralyzing touch to the neck—

  Just suppose for a minute that Weyland had been brazenly telling the truth all along, counting on her to treat it as a delusion because on the face of it the truth was inconceivable.

  Jesus, she thought, if I’m thinking that way about him, this therapy is more out of control than I thought. What kind of therapist becomes an accomplice to the client’s fantasy? A crazy therapist, that’s what kind.

  Frustrated and confused by the turmoil in her mind, she wandered into the workroom. By morning the floor was covered with sheets of newsprint, each broadly marked by her felt-tipped pen. Floria sat in the midst of them, gritty-eyed and hungry.

  She often approached problems this way, harking back to art training: turn off the thinking, put hand to paper and see what the deeper, less verbally sophisticated parts of the mind have to offer. Now that her dreams had deserted her, this was her only access to those levels.

  The newsprint sheets were covered with rough representations of Weyland’s face and form. Across several of them were scrawled words: “Dear Doug, your vampire is fine, it’s your ex-therapist who’s off the rails. Warning: therapy can be dangerous to your health. Especially if you are the therapist. Beautiful vampire, awaken to me. Am I really ready to take on a legendary monster? Give up—refer this one out. Do your job—work is a good doctor.”

  That last one sounded pretty good, except that doing her job was precisely what she was feeling so shaky about these days.

  Here was another message: “How come this attraction to someone so scary?” Oh ho, she thought, is that a real feeling or an aimless reaction out of the body’s early-morning hormone peak? You don’t want to confuse honest libido with mere biological clockwork.

  * * *

  Deborah called. Babies cried in the background over the Scotch Symphony. Nick, Deb’s husband, was a musicologist with fervent opinions on music and nothing else.

  “We’ll be in town a little later in the summer,” Deborah said, “just for a few days at the end of July. Nicky has this seminar-convention thing. Of course, it won’t be easy with the babies . . . I wondered if you might sort of coordinate your vacation so you could spend a little time with them?”

  Baby-sit, that meant. Damn. Cute as they were and all that, damn! Floria gritted her teeth. Visits from Deb were difficult. Floria had been so proud of her bright, hard-driving daughter, and then suddenly Deborah had dropped her studies and rushed to embrace all the dangers that Floria had warned her against: a romantic, too-young marriage, instant breeding, no preparation for self-support, the works. Well, to each her own, but it was so wearing to have Deb around playing the empty-headed hausfrau.

  “Let me think, Deb. I’d love to see all of you, but I’ve been considering spending a couple of weeks in Maine with your Aunt Nonnie.” God knows I need a real vacation, she thought, though the peace and quiet up there is hard for a city kid like me to take for long. Still, Nonnie, Floria’s younger sister, was good company. “Maybe you could bring the kids up there for a couple of days. There’s room in that great barn of a place, and of course Nonnie’d be happy to have you.”

  “Oh, no, Mom, it’s so dead up there, it drives Nick crazy—don’t tell Nonnie I said that. Maybe Nonnie could come down to the city instead. You could cancel a date or two and we could all go to Coney Island together, things like that.”

  Kid things, which would drive Nonnie crazy and Floria too, before long. “I doubt she could manage,” Floria said, “but I’ll ask. Look, hon, if I do go up there, you and Nick and the kids could stay here at the apartment and save some money.”

  “We have to
be at the hotel for the seminar,” Deb said shortly. No doubt she was feeling just as impatient as Floria was by now. “And the kids haven’t seen you for a long time—it would be really nice if you could stay in the city just for a few days.”

  “We’ll try to work something out.” Always working something out. Concord never comes naturally—first we have to butt heads and get pissed off. Each time you call I hope it’ll be different, Floria thought.

  Somebody shrieked for “oly,” jelly that would be, in the background—Floria felt a sudden rush of warmth for them, her grandkids for God’s sake. Having been a young mother herself, she was still young enough to really enjoy them (and to fight with Deb about how to bring them up).

  Deb was starting an awkward goodbye. Floria replied, put the phone down, and sat with her head back against the flowered kitchen wallpaper, thinking, Why do I feel so rotten now? Deb and I aren’t close, no comfort, seldom friends, though we were once. Have I said everything wrong, made her think I don’t want to see her and don’t care about her family? What does she want from me that I can’t seem to give her? Approval? Maybe she thinks I still hold her marriage against her. Well, I do, sort of. What right have I to be critical, me with my divorce? What terrible things would she say to me, would I say to her, that we take such care not to say anything important at all?

  * * *

  “I think today we might go into sex,” she said.

  Weyland responded dryly, “Might we indeed. Does it titillate you to wring confessions of solitary vice from men of mature years?”

  Oh no you don’t, she thought. You can’t sidestep so easily. “Under what circumstances do you find yourself sexually aroused?”

  “Most usually upon waking from sleep,” he said indifferently.

  “What do you do about it?”

  “The same as others do. I am not a cripple, I have hands.”

  “Do you have fantasies at these times?”

  “No. Women, and men for that matter, appeal to me very little, either in fantasy or reality.”